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It's the coldest, driest, windiest place on Earth – and when it comes to understanding what kind of future our descendants could face, Antarctica may also be the most important place on earth. Science reporter Jamie Morton spent two days in the McMurdo Dry Valleys.

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It's just gone 10.30am when I step out of a helicopter and into another planet.

The Dry Valleys and all that's in them – gargantuan glaciers, gravelly basins, flattened ranges and a lack of anything visibly green or growing – appear more like Mars than like McMurdo Sound, where we'd just flown in from.

The short hop from Scott Base had been almost entirely over ice and snow, then we'd swooped into this unearthly enclave called the Taylor Valley.

It's strange to think you can have an ice-free ecosystem amid the endless white of Antarctica's polar wilderness.

You can reach for resemblances – maybe the South Island's Mackenzie Basin, or Mt Tongariro's Red Crater – but little here is comparable to anywhere you've been on Earth.

It's all so very big – and so deceivingly cold.

Heatwaves can be seen rising as moisture is sucked from the soil, but the air is so bitterly biting that briefly pulling off my gloves to take a picture sends a sharp sting to the fingertips.

The summer temperature typically hovers just south of zero - a balmy afternoon at the beach by Antarctic standards – but it's the browns and reds and greys of the landscape that can make the chill unexpected.

An extraordinary amount of natural history is all here, neatly layered in the valley rim like a museum display case.

Some of the earliest rock is 600 million years old.

There are dark dolerite sills: a tell-tale sign of a massive volcanic system which, some 180 million years ago, produced eruptions titanic enough to tear the famous super-continent Gondwana apart.

If we fast-forward to 65 million years ago – around the time in Earth's history when dinosaurs met their apocalypse – we come to the birth of the dramatic 3500km mountain range that divides east and west Antarctica today.

Professor Tim Stern has long been in awe of these Transantarctic Mountains, and the ancient secrets they hold.

It so happens these valleys are the best places to unlock them.

Stern first came here as a fresh-faced 21-year-old, and he's returned more than four decades later as world-renowned Victoria University geophysicist.

Students Sam Treweek and Steven Kesler are here with him for a state-of-the-art gravity survey.

Each morning they climb out of their tents, pull on their boots, calibrate their GPS for 30 minutes and head out into the cold wind.

They take turns at lugging a 5kg gravity meter, which they fix into the ground every few hundred metres to record measurements in 15-minute bursts.

Their study all comes back to the rock properties and what's happening at the divide between the ancient continent that underlies much of East Antarctica and the far younger earth movements of West Antarctica.

Gravity readings help them calculate the density of mantle rocks at the boundary, which they're essentially trying to pinpoint.

"What's important from our point of view is to understand where this mantle extends, and how far it extends under the mountains," he says.

"And as we've been out walking in the Taylor Valley, we've seen active volcanism within two to three million years, which is a sure indication that the hot mantle is right under it."

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In the context of climate change, the work couldn't be more important.

That's because of something called post-glacial rebound: studies of the last Ice Age show how, as huge ice sheets melted, the outer part of the earth lifted as the weight was off-loaded.

"Global sea level change anywhere on earth is one of the first signals of post-glacial rebound," Stern says.

"So if you want to understand sea level changing – or how much of that is due to human influence versus natural background – you first have to unravel this process."

Antarctica's vast ice sheets store an equivalent 60m of potential sea level rise, yet we still don't know all that we should about how it will respond to a warming world.

I later find my own Mars-on-Earth impression of the valleys wasn't far off the mark.

Many researchers who study them do so with one eye toward understanding their geomorphology and bacterial life - and another on the range of potential surface processes and organisms that might be found on the red planet, now and in the future.

In a way, that's possible only on the coldest, driest, windiest continent on the globe, I really had stepped out of that helicopter and into a new world.